Us vs. Them: A Competitive Analysis
Date: November 16, 2012Category: Author: David Hall
I’ve browsed around a little to see what some other companies are doing with social media.
I just did a Google search on “social media for dentists.” Searchers who are familiar with Google’s personalized results realize that you need to use a Chrome incognito window to get accurate results, or you have to clear your browsing history in Internet explorer to do the same thing.
The top result, starting below the ads, is a website www.1dental.com where they list the top ten dentists in social media. These appear to be, without exception, dentists who are “do it yourselfers.” The top listing is for Dr. Jason Lipscomb, and the object of his home page is to get you to read his $70 book telling you how to do it yourself.
The trouble with the approach is that we have found maybe a 5% success rate in getting dentists to do the simplest social media activity on their own, and that is blogging. And the quality of the blogs have been poor – not the type of material that would attract patient traffic, much less links.
The second result is a blog that addresses social media for dentists, to again a do-it-yourself crowd. And Interestingly, the top post was complaining about this Blekko services that they were using for free tool to create and measure their services that is now charging $95 per month.
The blog has a pagerank of 1 and an Alexa traffic rank of almost 3 million. So traffic on this site is poor.
Let’s browse down farther to midway through the second page where we find the listing to My Social Practice. Now this is an organization that has a good reputation for managing social media for dentists. They are enlightened to the point where they know that to get this to happen they need to write for the dentists. However, their blog posts are stock articles, which is a serious problem if you’re trying to use your social media presence to enhance the Google rankings of your website. Google treats stock content as worthless – it adds no value to a search because it isn’t unique. It some cases, this activity could be penalized. My Social Practice also delivers very rudimentary stats, making it hard to tell exactly how well the Facebook and Twitter accounts are performing for you.
Just above Infinity Dental Web’s page in the rankings is the page for the social media program of PBHS. In their description tag, they claim, “PBHS, the industry leader in dental social media marketing. YouTube, Twitter, & Facebook Marketing for Dentists and Doctors.” But when you read the blog, you find they have a very hands-off approach. They announce: “PBHS will set up your blog, provide you with a walk through consultation and online instructions. You will receive topic content ideas with your PBHS Submit or Advanced Submit Packages reports.” In other words, they teach you how to do it, and then you’re on your own. No, with an approach like that, PBHS, you cannot be “the leader,” because there is a much better way to do it.
This is where my twenty years as a private practice dentist give us a leg up on the competition. 95% of dental office staff won’t do this on their own, so your blog, your Facebook page, and your Twitter account will sit largely idle. And even when they do write, it isn’t engaging. But you wouldn’t expect it to be. They’re dental assistants, not professional writers. We measure the effectiveness of your program with numbers for engagement, Klout, retweeting, referrals, and other numbers. We know the types of posts that boost those numbers, and we will get it done. And for a very reasonable fee of $395 per month you simply won’t have to worry about it.
No, Infinity Dental Web, appears to run the industry-leading social media for dentists program. The reason is that we’re simply search engine smart in how we go about this. Don’t trust anyone else. You see, our whole company philosophy is that we focus on results. Our object is to engage your patients, get them excited about your practice, increase referral rates and treatment plan acceptance and compliance with doctor recommendations. We know how to make that happen.
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